Creating a simple Spring Boot application

Spring Boot helps in creating production-ready, Spring-based applications easily. It provides support for working with almost all Spring libraries, without any need to configure them explicitly. There are auto-configuration classes provided for easy integration with most commonly-used libraries, databases, and message queues.

In this recipe, we will look at creating a simple Spring Boot application with a controller that prints a message when opened in the browser. 

Getting ready

Spring Boot supports Maven and Gradle as its build tools, and we will be using Maven in our recipes. The following URL, http://start.spring.io/, provides a convenient way to create an empty project with the required dependencies. We will use it to download an empty project. Follow these steps to create and download an empty Spring Boot-based project:

1. Navigate to http://start.spring.io/ to see something similar to the following screenshot:

2. You can select the dependency-management...